Open Source is Big News at JavaOne

In her keynote address that kicked off this year's JavaOne, Pat
Sueltz, Sun Microsystems' Executive
V.P. and General Manager, Software Systems Group, promised that this
year's conference would have more substance
and less smoke than in recent years. By and large, this was the case.
The vendors at the BOF (Birds of a Feather) and
Technical sessions were more focused on technology and on
addressing developers. Sessions that mentioned
Web Services tended to attract the largest audiences this year, but
there was a wide variety of high quality offerings.
In the pavillion, traffic was down, but the decrease in the number of
swag seekers meant that qualified prospects had a chance to
get their questions heard and answered.

For the most part, Sun restricted their marketing to the keynotes.
Despite small announcements
here or there, there wasn't a lot of technology-oriented news. Sure, Sun
referred to JSR (Java Specification Request) 172 on Web Services
standards for J2ME clients, along with a few other JAX (Java APIs for
XML) Pack and Web Services JSRs. In addition to demos of enterprise and
wireless applications, Sun highlighted desktop applications during the
various keynotes. The technical keynotes previewed
what's to come in the next releases of J2EE 1.4 and J2SE 1.4.1, and those to come
later in J2SE 1.5. Although the slides showed J2EE being released later
this year, the Sun presenters talked about the release as coming early
next year.

The biggest news of this year's JavaOne was delivered Tuesday morning
by Jason Hunter,
an Apache Software Foundation vice president, co-creator of JDOM,
and author of the popular O'Reilly Servlets book. Flanked by Sun CEO
Scott
McNeally and Sun vice president Rob Gingell, Hunter outlined an
agreement negotiated between Sun and Apache that has broad-ranging
implications to developers and to the future of Java itself. First,
all in-progress and future Sun-led Java Specification Requests (JSRs)
will be made available
under a license that allows for open source.

In addition, key JSRs that have already
been released will have their license altered to this newer, more open
license. Even JSRs not being led by Sun can release their reference
implementations under an open source license. Finally, Test
Compatibility Kits (TCKs) for
Sun-led JSRs will be made available for free to qualifying open source
and academic groups.

There is a further important implication of Sun's statement that
"Sun will modify the specification licenses
of all the JSRs currently in progress to reflect Apache's requirements
as met in the new draft JSPA." The JSPA is the legal agreement signed by
members
when they join the Java Community Process. Hunter points out that the
draft JSPA includes the
requirement that the TCK be licensed separately from the Reference
Implementation (RI). In the
past, commercial interests, which used to have to license the RI
and TCK together, were bound by some interesting legal issues
by having the RI source. Under the new agreement, they can now pay just
for the TCK. This will
help JBoss, for example, which can't get the TCK because it's currently
only
provided with the RI; they can't see the RI and remain
independent.

In a later conversation with Hunter, he explained that the "goal is to
get legal issues out of the way so that people can write great
software and release it under the license they choose." The agreement
has not yet been finalized. Although optimistic that the details can
be worked out, Hunter will remain vigilant until, as he puts it, "the ball
is actually over the goal line." He adds that he knows "Sun has put a lot of
work
into the agreement and appears sincere on executing the plan, but much
work remains."

Daniel H. Steinberg
is the editor for the new series of Mac Developer titles for the Pragmatic Programmers. He writes feature articles for Apple's ADC web site and is a regular contributor to Mac Devcenter. He has presented at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference, MacWorld, MacHack and other Mac developer conferences.